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May 20 Toxic Masculinity

Our course series is created in conjunction with the performance of “He” in Austin this April. The performance is a dystopian meditation on patriarchy and toxic masculinity, and whether or not the possibility exists of restructuring masculinity within a feminist, collaborative, decolonized / decolonizing framework.

In our classes, we consider gender-as-performance, the ways in which patriarchy shapes those performances, how toxic masculinity shapes the current administration, and explore what better modes of being.

Week one, we talk about gender. What is it, who has it (is it even something you "have?"), and how is it failing us? Specifically, we'll read about performances of masculinity as both an intro to and a way to GenderFuck the rest of our series.

Last week, we launched our Toxic Masculinity series with a class on the way rigid gender binaries fail. For Wednesday, we'll keep this failure in mind as we examine the patriarchy through a canonical article by bell hooks and an investigation into affect and emotion in the Men's Rights Movement.

In advance of this week’s discussion group on Toxic Masculinity and the rise of Trump, we invite you to join us for Monday night’s free film screening of Volker Schlondorff’s tragically under-viewed 1966 post-war film, Young Torless, 7pm at the Motion Media Arts Center (2200 Tillery St.). The film follows Torless, a gifted student at a pre-war Austrian boarding school who witnesses and participates in “the ‘normal traumatization’ of boys,” as Terrence Real put it in last week’s bell hooks reading. Based on a novel by early 20th century philosopher Robert Musil, the film observes the cruelties and disciplinary functions of adolescent masculinity.

More to the point, it explores how this violent behavior is rationalized and normalized, both internally and systemically. This will be crucially helpful as we think through the rise of the alt-right in the U.S., and the ways in which the current president’s most toxic behavior has been normalized, excused, and even embraced as an expression of his “strength” and “manhood.” Though the film was intended as a socio-psychological study of the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, chilling correlations to our own moment lie just below the surface.

In this class, a continuation of our series on Toxic Masculinity, we'll consider trolling and Trump. What does masculinity look like on the internet (or at least in some of its darker corners), and what is the relationship between those surprisingly complicated demonstrations of chauvinism and the masculinity of the Tweeter-in-Chief? At the same time, how does criticism of Trump itself traffic in discourses of proper male behavior and morphology and phallic shaming?

Continuing our series on Toxic Masculinity, in this class we will begin to consider possible alternatives to the violent, patriarchal bullshit we've been discussing so far. The Heart podcast, "an audio art project about intimacy and humanity," recently did a series on this very issue, and we will use that season as our primary text for this class. The series, "Pansy," looks at what happens when masculinity and femininity meet, and reveals how transgressive and suspect femininity still is even in some queer spaces.

"He is a immersive concert experience that seeks to investigate and critique toxic masculinity in our current socio-political moment, and also explore gentler, more collaborative, more radical avenues for male-ness and masculinity. The performance meshes vocally driven electronic music with show specific custom projections, lighting, stage design, wardrobe, and surround sound to create a fully immersive aesthetic experience."

In advance of the He, Human Sciences will hold a discussion with Ben Martin on his concert, reflecting on the process of theorizing and developing the event. This class is free and open to the public.